Dracula (2025)
Flickscore: 7
Chart: 5,481/5,872
Luc Besson, a director whose profession now carries appreciable controversy, returns with yet one more adaptation of Dracula. The movie stars a dedicated Caleb Landry Jones, a curiously disengaged Christoph Waltz, and Zoë Bleu Sidel, who’s given little to do past gazing lovingly at Jones’ Depend.
Besson proves he can nonetheless conjure a placing visible world, although the CGI continuously betrays him. The movie’s strongest aesthetic work comes from costume designer Corinne Bruand, whose designs assist floor the opening act in an operatic, gothic grandeur. Besson begins with a unfastened historic tether to Vlad the Impaler, and for a quick stretch, Dracula feels centered — lush, theatrical, and visually assured.
From there, the movie steadily unravels. Every actor seems to be performing in a special adaptation. Jones commits absolutely to a melodramatic gothic romance, enjoying Dracula with sincerity and emotional weight. Waltz, against this, sleepwalks by means of his function as a quippy priest-hunter, delivering pithy line readings that drain rigidity somewhat than construct it. Making issues worse, Besson saddles his Depend with an ensemble of gargoyle servants that really feel imported from a kids’s animated aspect undertaking. Each scene they share undercuts Jones’ efficiency, collapsing ambiance into tonal confusion.
Besson’s borrowing is blatant. The movie lifts liberally from Coppola’s Dracula whereas trying — and failing — to graft on a Hammer-inspired seriousness laced with camp. As an alternative of reaching stylized extra, the movie drifts awkwardly between gothic romance and one thing perilously near a Disney fantasy.
One vivid spot emerges in Matilda De Angelis, who performs considered one of Dracula’s victims. Her efficiency is energetic, emotionally current, and simply probably the most compelling within the movie. She provides Dracula its uncommon moments of vitality. Finally, Besson’s Dracula is all visible flourish with out cohesion. What lies beneath is a patchwork of stolen concepts, mismatched tones, and half-formed ambitions, stitched collectively by a filmmaker hoping to experience the renewed wave of gothic horror with out understanding what provides it life.
